What Was That About Patience?

I found out again this week that balancing patience with the need to book profits when they're on the table can be more than a little frustrating!

"Hogs get slaughtered", goes the old adage but I've been passing up gains that aren't even pig-sized on a few of my swing trades recently trying to reach my trading targets as the stocks have popped small but then given back the gains in fairly short order.

Netlist (NLST), Hauppauge Digitial (HAUP) and Callon Pete (CPE) are all cases in point but NLST in particular has been failing at 3.20 and then dropping back under 3.00. Unfortunately, I was away from my screen for much of yesterday so couldn't adjust my sell limit order down from 3.20 when the stock reached an intraday high of 3.19. When I did get back behind my computer, NLST was bleeding away towards 3.00 again so I sold at 3.01 thinking it was head back into the 2.90s where I could re-buy...

...only for it to gap up and run without me all the way to 3.25 this morning! I'd held the stock since last month in anticipation of just such and run and then been left standing on the platform when the train left the station!

The good news, of course, is that NLST usually comes back down and it closed around 3.08. With the bottom of the current rising trend line sitting around 2.90, I hope to add to the "scaling in" shares I bought at 3.17 today as the stock took a breather before deciding which way it was headed.

I was able to re-buy half my position in HDY at 1.90 yesterday, though, and with the stock looking over-bought at these levels, it might be hard for it to crack 2.00 on this go around, offering hope that I can purchase the other half in the 1.70s before any next leg up.

Next week, the October FDA plays — $JAZZ, $HGSI and $ALXA, in particular, as they all have PDUFA dates in the first 11 days of the month — should come into sharp focus. Having ridden $HGSI from $3 but sold prematurely at $12 last year, I've been out of that stock, but hold shares in $JAZZ, $ALXA and $AVNR which has now started it's FDA run-up in earnest, finishing today at the high of 3.22 and tacking on more gains in after hours trading the past two days. More on those to come.

In terms of my unsuccessful attempts at day-trading, I took a small 2% loss on Fuel Cell (FCEL) today after the stock failed to take the next leg up after an early breakout, and held shares of GenVec (GNVC) after buying at 0.61 and that stock too also stopped short of breaking out.

The short-term chart on GNVC looks promising, though, and it's a stock that can move when it wants to, as the last three sessions show.